alt Hacker NewsWasn't Google's business model to slurp up literally everything on the web, and everything users would give them to sell eyeballs to advertisers?
Gmail also dates to 2004. If reading your email to sell ads to third parties based on the content of your private correspondence doesn't fit that attitude, I don't know what does.
I stand by my assertion that this shit was always going on, we just weren't wise to it in the 2000s.
Google's early business model was to make something cool and figure out monetization later, like many firms from that era. When they got acquired by Doubleclick, they pivoted to advertising but still took time to get it to the evil stage.